The Old Rog Bicycle Factory

Whenever we come to Ljubljana, we always stumble across something we haven’t seen before.  This year, one of those things was the Rog bicycle factory (technically, it wasn’t something we hadn’t seen before, as it’s an enormous building on the river near old town and we had walked by it at least a hundred times; we just had no idea what it used to be, or what it is today).

The factory is where Rog bicycles were manufactured from 1953 to 1991, when Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia.  It spent the next fifteen years abandoned and was then opened up to local artists.  The building hasn’t had any updates since 1991 and most of the windows are broken, but while it doesn’t look like much from the outside, today there is a thriving artist community on the inside.  And it’s about as unique a building as we’ve seen.

We also learned that Rog bikes have quite a following among certain groups here, and if you’re lucky enough to own one of the classics, you better not let it out of your sight!